This graduate seminar (welcoming advanced undergrads with instructor permission) examines epic literature’s entanglements with empire, colonialism, ethnicity, indigeneity, and slavery via critical readings of Vergil’s Aeneid. Students will gain methodological and pragmatic familiarity with movements to ‘decolonize’ and globalize the study of antiquity. As a counterbalance to Classics’ historical service to imperialism, we will read Vergil alongside other literary epics on race, identity, and belonging, representing diverse global languages, belief systems, geographies, and positionalities. We will also survey classics of postcolonial thought, from Fanon to Hartman, and apply their theories and methods to primary sources. Our hope is to incubate reparative approaches to the Aeneid and epic literature while also evaluating novel methodologies of comparison, reception, resistant interpretation, and critical fabulation. Classics graduate students will read the Aeneid in Latin. Undergraduate and non-Classics graduate students may read in translation but should plan on substantial engagement with an additional epic of their choice. All will hone professional skills as they produce a final research paper suitable for conference presentation or open-access web publication on race-time.net.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandey, Nandini
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

The past few years have seen several consequential texts investigating the methods of literary criticism: writing by John Guillory, Jonathan Kramnick, Anaheid Nercessian, Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh, and others have responded forcibly to both longstanding disciplinary debates and newly pressing economic forces. Among the most notable features of this discussion has been a new attention to writing as the medium of method; while drawing on a long theoretical history (likely to include work by Weber and Adorno) we will spend a good deal of time with the methodogical implications of contemporary critical prose.

• Days/Times: T 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

Today human rights and capabilities are two intertwined concepts, each subject to contemporary critique. In the early modern period, these were much debated and literature was a key site for the development of these imperfect, variable and contested discourses. Reading literary works from the European tradition, in particular in Europeans' engagement with dissident groups both within (women, religious dissidents, the Irish) and outside Europe (Ottoman, African, American), we will explore themes of: exclusion, embodiment, risk, vulnerability, and the languages and practices of equivalence and domination in the variable discourses of humanitarianism, population and resource management and natural law in authors including Shakespeare, Grotius, Montaigne, Hobbes, Behn, Locke, Astell, Swift, Montagu and Defoe.

• Days/Times: Th 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

What if the social doesn't just "contain" literature but takes its cues from it? This course will address the fundamental and ongoing questions about the way people live and the role of social practice in defining, producing, and using literature. In this course we will ask about the material production of texts; about the role of readers in appropriating them; about the alliance of literature to class and institutional settings; about the human interactions that literature models for us and their problems; and about the connection between literary studies and globalization. Rather than regard “the social” as simply a shorthand for “social problems,” and literature’s relationship to it as merely indexical or diagnostic, we will explore more complex versions of both sociality and its relationship to literature. Course materials takes up bodies of knowledge that fall in the contact zone between sociology and literary theory—Marxian hermeneutics, discourse-network theory, media studies, book history, narratology, object-oriented ontologies, and systems theory--and assess their worth for changing conversations in literary studies without rendering literary criticism obsolete. In fact, we will seriously consider the idea that literary criticism has much to say about truly complex sociological and social phenomena, and conditions of modernity, perhaps doing sociology better than sociology in its present form. Another question we will ask is if Kantian aesthetics can be reconciled with Bourdieuian sociology, studying pieces of interpretation and theory that do exactly that. Aside from many canonical sociological texts, students will be given a solid introduction to British Cultural Studies, the Frankfurt School, Poststructuralism, Affect Studies, and Book History.

• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students in their first spring semester. They will get their first bit of experience with TAship responsibilities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students/candidates in their third year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively performing an administrative/service role with the program/department or university that precludes any teaching responsibilities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. For those who receive external funding and will neither do the expected teaching or participate in any kind of departmental service as required.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students who have successfully passed their exam and have entered "candidacy." The DGS will host workshops over the course of the spring to help with writing the dissertation prospectus that will outline their dissertation project.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students who have successfully passed their exam and have entered "candidacy." This indicates they are actively writing/working on their dissertation prospectus that will outline their dissertation project.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia; Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 32/40
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar takes as its jumping off point the question of how the representation of race and ethnicity intersects with theories surrounding aesthetics, literary form, and speculation writ large, proposing that the investigation of these elements and their various imbrications offer an important aperture to consider the contemporary, and ways to reflect on the haunting remainders of history as they become manifest in cultural production.

• Days/Times: M 2:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): MLL-SPAN

This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale
• Room: Krieger 304
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Maryland 114
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course considers modernist and modernism-adjacent texts that raise questions not only about human values but also about the very value of humanity or human beings in the world or the cosmos. Writers to be studied may include Richard Jefferies, Rabindranath Tagore, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mourning Dove, Graham Greene, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens, and Olaf Stapledon.

• Days/Times: Th 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

When someone says that a politician is being “theatrical” or that a protestor is following a “script,” it is rarely meant as a compliment—but why? The implication is that true politics is never theatrical, never scripted, never performed, never entangled with spectacle. Put so baldly, this claim is hard to believe. If, instead, we take for granted that all politics is performed, we are left with several unanswered questions. What would an eye trained on performance (theater, dance, film, comedy, spoken word, etc.) see in our politics that someone else would not? Are there distinct performance traditions in politics, as there are in the performing arts? How do activists and office-holders enter these traditions, learn their ways, and apply them in everyday settings? How are civilians expected (or trained) to engage with this performance of politics—either as spectators or co-performers? What are the key genres of political performance, and what should citizens, activists, and other engaged people know about them? This course surveys key concepts in performance theory (e.g., theatricality, performativity, ritual, play) and asks students to apply these tools to two things: political events and performance-based works of art. Case studies will center around US political and performance history, and may include: the origins of US liberal-democratic political culture in stoical forms of theater, the theatricality of the Civil Rights movement, and the recent transformation of transgressive play from a radical-left to a far-right style of political performance. Students will be invited to bring their expertise in other periods and other political/performance cultures, and to help sharpen our analysis by testing our ideas against those alternate contexts.

• Days/Times: T 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Grobe, Christopher Arthur
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is for English graduate students who are pre-candidacy and need to be credited for work over the summer.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

The privilege of thinking has faced two challenges in recent years. The advent of artificial intelligence has called into question how unique thinking is when cognition can easily be mimicked, if not (re)produced, in machines through statistical models of language. An equally prevalent, if opposing, development in critical theory is the expansion of thought to include all purposeful action, such as the spreading of information among trees regarding available resources. The first half of the semester will be devoted to the definition of thinking offered by Aristotle and its interpretation in selected texts by Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. The second half will consider the surge of interest in automatons in romantic literature (Novalis, Hoffmann, Kleist and Poe) and culminating in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy.

• Days/Times: Th 2:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Tobias, Rochelle
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Pushing off from Samuel Johnson’s allegation that in Donne’s poetry “heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together”, this seminar will reconsider the status of metaphor and the nature of authorial agency. Can metaphors themselves enact violence? Or is such a question a category mistake? This seminar will build out from the intuition that figurative assemblage and social hierarchy are necessarily related, but it does not presume in advance that we all agree about how this relationship works. We will read an array of divergent accounts of how metaphors operate across literary criticism, rhetoric, and the philosophy of language (Aristotle, early modern rhetorical manuals, as well as Lakoff, Black, Davidson, Donoghue), and we will consider key metaphoric relationships (body as landscape, orgasm as death, kingdom as family, love as slavery, sexual violence as hunting) as they surface in early modern literature. Literary texts will include poetry by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Marvell and Pope.

• Days/Times: M 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively performing an administrative/service role with the program/department or university that precludes any teaching responsibilities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is intended to train students in skills required by the discipline, help prepare them for a range of futures, and integrate them into the university community.

• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a